As I write these words, sitting across from me is a man worth billions. He’s in a plain white t-shirt, black shorts, and sandals, sipping a three-dollar coffee, no different from mine. I am living in Network School, an experimental community in Forest City, Malaysia, where founders, remote workers, and other internet-native builders live together as they work on projects, train, and live under the same roof. Network School is an attempt to gather talent, capital, and shared values in one place as a prototype of a Network State, which is a nation that begins online and hopes, over time, to become politically real. One of the mantras of a Network State is “cloud first, land last.” If one can speak of Forest City as a settlement, and if that man-made island contains full-time craft specialists such as founders, engineers, marketers, influencers, musicians, and traders, then the internet systems coordinating it begin to resemble a start-up society. Network School is offering society-as-a-service.

What is the archetype of a remote worker who travels to a once-abandoned island in Malaysia to attend an esoteric school? Is the person leading, exploring, or fleeing? Are their motives for attending rooted in duty, vocation, or avoidance? As they meet other people, are they genuine or just actors? Are their personalities authentic, or do they perform a persona? Are they engaging with the community by lending a hand, or are they just witnessing it? Do they want to go along with collaboration, go ahead by leading, or go solo? I found myself circling these questions as the place slowly came into focus.

Some people in Network School are here to use Forest City as a base so they can travel around Asia, especially with Singapore being just a 40-minute drive away. Others are nomadic workers who want to lock in their earning potential by minimizing costs. Founders come here to stay for months at a time and have a routine readily available to focus on building their startups. Then we have people who come to find relationships and grow deeper bonds with friends or lovers, not to mention the ones seeking situationships, or worse, having affairs. Others may want to farm equity by being early to a novel yet potentially profitable idea. Taken together, if the Network School succeeds in becoming a Network State, the alumni will find themselves in a position of significant wealth and status.

After spending three months living in Marina Hotel, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing people introduce themselves. The line of questioning typically goes, “Where are you from?” or “What are you working on?” Unlike startup founders, I find it difficult to talk about myself because there’s a hint of shame in what I do. Sure, I have a relatively respectful career as a consultant solving corporate problems for clients. Although I’m skilled enough, the obstacle in my path is working towards something other than a paycheck. Even so, despite being at odds with the people at Network School who are seeking breakthroughs with blockchains and agents, I cannot help but feel like their equal. Our tax brackets may be far apart, but under the same roof at Marina Hotel, the distance can feel smaller than expected.

I came here as a remote worker hoping to understand what kind of people and desires this startup society gathers. I now plan to stay in Malaysia for a year to write about this frontier community. Network School is not just attracting techno-optimists. It invites people who feel that old institutions no longer organize ambition or meaning well enough. The people I interact with daily are not categorized demographically, but by problems they are trying to solve in Forest City. One may be seeking influence, another belonging or reinvention, or a sense of discipline, proximity to power, or escape from stagnation. To me, Network School is starting out as a sorting device for desire before it becomes a political entity.

I can feel how much people project and anticipate one another’s judgment, and what I say next is definitely from my own projections, but I find it slightly difficult to cultivate relationships that I have organically grown in the past. What interests me is not simply that some people are fake. In environments built around networking, performance becomes structurally rational. If identity is partly assembled in public through intros, timelines, projects, and signals of ambition, then everyone is under some pressure to become seen in a flattering way. That does not mean the community is insincere, but sincerity itself can feel staged. A person may genuinely want to build or belong while also curating how that desire appears to others. These are my feelings after the third month of living here. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and for start-up societies to function well, there must be such rules for civility.

The danger is not in playing a role but in repeating it until it becomes your identity. Identifying a performative male is like running a Turing test to see whether a machine is human; you’ll know he’s real when he stops pretending. Like the For You Page that learns from repetition, such people become clever algorithms designed to manufacture admiration rather than meaning, running until the man inside realizes he has worked overtime to impress people who are not actually there. That was what led me toward the Light Forest Theory: the sense that what felt personal in Forest City was also structural, because the environment rewards strong signalling and public performance of building.

The internet makes it easy to find strangers who are wacky enough to gather on a ghost island in Malaysia to learn skills, earn capital, and burn calories as a community. The internet revolution was accompanied by the availability of blockchains, originally designed for currency but now poised to organize large groups of people. Not to mention, the abundance of processors originally designed to handle 3D graphics in gaming, now being used to train AI agents with large datasets. Together, those ingredients make start-up societies more plausible. Seen that way, beyond the technical infrastructure, Network School is gathering talent while also building a social environment where visibility itself becomes a resource.

The Dark Forest Theory assumes that in a universe where intentions are unknowable, signalling invites attack. Fermi’s paradox of “Where is everybody?” becomes “Everybody’s here, they’re just quiet.” To survive, one must stay silent. By contrast, the Light Forest Theory suggests that in public networks, signalling is rewarded rather than punished. A light forest emerges when coordination technologies like the internet make signalling net-positive. It is a place for people show their work to earn wealth and influence. By that logic, a society should strive to become a light forest for its people. That is part of what Network School is attempting by attracting “dark talent.” What keeps it from being just another startup scene is that the social experiment and the political ambition are inseparable.

If the world rewards being seen, then the kind of society it produces will be shaped by people who know how to make themselves visible while also maintaining privacy (topic for another time). We are already creating through our digital activities, enormously rich records of how we think and what we feel, and during this decade, our technology for recording, storing, and organizing this information will advance rapidly. When talent becomes legible online, it becomes easier to find, coordinate, and assemble into new institutions. Network States promise to build new institutions from online coordination rather than inherited constraints. On the other hand, Network School is a prototype of that ambition, a proof of concept meant to show the idea has legs. The team secured an island near Singapore, built a school campus inside a hotel, invited “dark talent” from across the world, and began assembling a community on the once-abandoned island of Forest City.

There’s a scene in Thor: Ragnarok where the God of Thunder talks to Odin about the Kingdom of Asgard getting destroyed. Odin responds, “Asgard isn’t a place. Never was. This could be Asgard. Asgard is where our people stand.” That gets at the core idea behind Network States: the people matter more than the place. Network States are “cloud first, land last” because the cloud is where the people connect, and the land is where they meet. If Network School is a prototype of a Network State, then its attendees are a prototype of a new citizenship. In that sense, Network School is not a place, it’s a people. Its most durable resource is not land, but the social scalability of the community itself.

As I got to know people at Forest City, I found myself reaching for explanations in the media they consumed, the people they spent time with, their core beliefs, capitalism, unresolved trauma, or even the possibility that staying on an isolated island to attend an esoteric school was itself a kind of performance. Living with remote workers has shown me that people have a need for security and a desire for status. We want to identify with some group and have control over our own fate. When these needs go unmet, agreement gets harder, and incentives soon reveal the outcome. The team has identified that by hosting nomadic builders under one roof, offering co-working and gym spaces, while taking care of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there could be a dense concentration of talent at relatively low-cost ($1,500–$3,000 per month). The problem the team has yet to solve is how to align people’s self-interest with the growth of a startup society. When such motives enter a highly visible social environment, they do not remain private for long.

What keeps me interested is that Network School still feels unresolved, which is revealing in an optimistic sense. It is part school, part social sorting machine, part prototype for a political future, and the people it attracts may tell us as much about the future of institutions as the institution itself. Living here has made me suspect that what is being tested is not just a new campus model, but a new answer to where ambitious people go when older institutions no longer know how to organize meaning and belonging. I’ll keep writing from the inside as the shape becomes clearer. If you’d like to apply to Network School, use this link. Otherwise, subscribe to my letters and live through me by reading how the story unfolds.